Monk Healing is Crazy Confusing

I've been playing wow for over 6 years now and I did hardcore healing heroic raiding in wrath and haven't healed since. Since monk came out I thought I would give it a shot as an alt after leveling and gearing my main.

I have to say, after doing some research and actually trying to memorize and heal via mistweaver....I had no clue what I was doing. I tried, I really did, I could not for the life of me understand the mana/chi thing. Back in my healing days of wrath we had one thing as a resto shaman...mana.

I'm not dissing monk healers or anything but man I had have the utmost respect for those monk healers out there. I think I'll just stick to dps for all my alts lol my healing days are over.

I've not really tried monk healing since early beta, but found that standard healing was fine, the melee healing was a lot more complicated, as you were doing a melee rotation while having to throw out healing spells too . . .

I've been playing a Disc priest for several years and really enjoyed it, but decided to roll Mistweaver Monk when Mists hit - and so far I've loved the raiding I've seen (currently only 4/6 this reset so far). It is a really different playstyle, and I still often go "oshit" and have no idea what to push, but it'll fix itself soon I hope. The melee heal style is fun, and you can really make it what you want - I usually just keep up the buff and having auto-attack up while using Jab for Chi generation.

It's not that complicated once you get the hang of the basics. Stay out of melee for now while learning. Place your statue and cast Renewing Mists on cooldowns to keep it on everyone, then use your chi for Uplift to AoE heal or Enveloping Mist to heal a single target. Think of chi as something like a shared short cooldown; every ~10 seconds you can use one of your funky chi abilities, which will put all of them "on cooldown". Cast Soothing Mist when someone needs healing and your other stuff is on cooldown. Use Surging Mist as your Greater Healing Wave; costs more mana but heals for more.

Could you not go into more details? How confusing can it be when you only have Eminence and Soothing Mist at the start? Melee attacks heal your melee and your soothing mists/other heals are for ranged (thats the philosophy they stated). Chi are very similar to energy other than the fact that the system isn't on your enemy but yourself